What is "cathartic"

Usage examples of "cathartic".

He would naturally think twice before he gave an emetic or cathartic which evacuated his own pocket, and be sparing of the cholagogues that emptied the biliary ducts of his own wallet, unless he were sure they were needed.

The ritual would provide a cathartic release for antisocial and antiauthoritarian impulses, either exhausting those persons, crippling them, or removing them entirely via death.

If the salts cannot be taken a three- or five-grain, chocolate-coated, cascara sagrada tablet, may be taken before retiring, but other cathartics should not be taken unless the physician prescribes them.

It will be seen that what the surgeon wanted consisted chiefly of opiates, stimulants, cathartics, plasters, and materials for bandages.

I felt faintly ashamed of myself and took little joy in the victory, and on the long path back to the unsaddling enclosure felt not a cathartic release from tension but an increasing fear that my mount would drop dead from an over-strained heart.

The cathartic trauma of actually going in somewhere officially Psych-, some understanding nods, some bare indication somebody gives half a damn they rally, back out they go.

As though this situation was somehow going to be cathartic for both of them.

Her statement, which ordinarily would have had no other signifi- cance than the one she alluded to, or the one I myself read into it, had the special quality of a cathartic device.

Don Juan had insisted that the whole issue of sorcery was perception, and truthful to that, he and don Genaro staged, for our last meeting, an immense, cathartic drama on the flat mountaintop.

Briefly, Anna thought of what she might tell him, wondered if it would have the cathartic effect of confession.

Hector, whose inside was continually being churned with cathartics, very often had this symptom, and the worm powder was poured from its pink tissue wrapper upon his tongue, followed by a gobbet of jam which only made the dose more gritty and nauseous.

We found four different herbs that are the most violent cathartics you ever dreamed of.

With the addition of an ape jock called Brad Maxi and a revolting goody-goody brother for Kevin called Aaron, The Suburbs amounted to a wickedly cathartic bloodletting against their shared boyhoods.

Bleak as it was, it was a sign of life, and Anna pressed on not knowing whether the experiment would prove cathartic or would break the last weight-bearing wall in his poor old brain.

This meant that at seven bells in the morning watch the Ramillies's captain had stuffed himself with rhubarb, brimstone, the inspissated juice of figs and any other cathartics that happened to be at hand, so that he would be confined to the seat of ease in his quarter-gallery, groaning and straining, for the greater part of the day, clearly unfit as a guest at a dinner-table.